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What’s in a Letter?

In 2009, Shaun Usher was searching for a new way to sell people on letter writing. He’d dropped out of university several years before, and, at the time, he was working as a freelance copywriter. (“Copywriter might be a bit of an exaggeration,” he said, “I wasn’t exactly Don Draper.”) He felt like the job was “slowly eating away” at him. One client kept sending him assignments for a stationery retailer. Eventually, drained of ideas, Usher headed to the library to look through books of letters, hoping that they might hold some inspiration. “I ended up spending days reading these old letters and became absolutely fascinated. I caught the bug immediately.”

“The bug” is an obsession with written communication, which has more or less taken over his life. Within a few days of those first library visits, Usher started Letters of Note, a Web site that he describes as “a blog-based archive of fascinating correspondence.” His first post was a letter, sent in 1938, by Walt Disney Productions to a female job applicant, telling her that “women do not do any of the creative work” at the company. A transcript appears in the post, along with a facsimile of the original letter, typewritten on beautiful, colorful stationery and featuring art from “Snow White.” Soon after, Usher posted a letter in which Mario Puzo asks Marlon Brando to be in the “The Godfather,” and then a cryptic note from the Zodiac killer to the San Francisco police. Within months, the blog had a large, dedicated following. Usher never found his inspiration for fresh stationery copy. A year later, his copywriting career had “plunged into silence” and he was collecting letters full time. A book version of “Letters of Note” was on the Sunday Times best-seller list for more than a month last year. The U.S. edition was published in May.

I recently spoke with Usher over Skype. He lives in Cheshire, England, with his wife and his two young sons. His face, trim and elfish in his author photo, was covered in a prodigious black beard. Over his shoulder, a wanly sunny English day was visible through a window propped open with two hardcover books.

The success of “Letters of Note” is certainly a tribute to the charm of written correspondence, but it’s also evidence of the value of a supportive spouse—Usher’s wife, who was working as a manager for a cosmetics company, supported the family alone for most of two years before his work became profitable—and the indispensability of tireless trench work. These days, Usher receives a steady flow of submissions and has connections with a number of archivists. Starting out, however, there was much more digging involved. He says, “In those days … I’d get a list of famous people and I’d type into Google, I don’t know, ‘Stan Laurel letter’ and I’d literally just search about Google to see what I could find. And it worked to an extent.” His first letter to go viral was found this way, several pages into the search results. It’s an unusually kind and lengthy letter to a young fan from John Kricfalusi, the creator of the cartoon “Ren and Stimpy.” It included sketches, encouragement (“Alright Bastard, let’s get to work. Draw!”) and practical cartooning advice (“Learn how to draw hands.”)

Most of the letters are presented in both transcript and facsimile, giving the entries the textured quality of archival shadowboxes, arranged for quiet consideration. Reading through them is addictive, like dipping into a bag of variously tempting assorted candies, knowing that the next one will always bring surprise and pleasure. Usher has an evident knack for selecting letters that land with the force of a good short story, with personalities and dramatic arcs emerging swiftly, from just a page or two. Many of the writers are famous people, caught in a moment of accessibility and rawness or off-the-cuff virtuosity: Beethoven on his deafness: “I must live almost alone, like one who has been banished.”; Nick Cave withdrawing himself from consideration for an MTV award: “My muse is not a horse and I am in no horse race. And if indeed she was, still I would not harness her to this tumbrel—this bloody cart of severed heads and glittering prizes.” But some of the most affecting letters are those of non-celebrities writing about their lives with an expressiveness and a close attention that lend their experiences a kind of grandness. The most popular post on the site is a sardonic 1865 message from an emancipated slave to his former master: “Although you shot at me twice before I left you, I did not want to hear of your being hurt.” Usher’s current favorite is from a couple who found the body of one of the victims of the Lockerbie bombing on their farm, to the family of the victim. They write with, poetic frankness: “When your dear one came to us from the night, it was so unbelievable, haunting and desperately sad.”

Usher estimates that he reads at least twenty unusable letters for each one that he ends up including. He says, “I’ve bought hundreds of books purely to find one letter I just had a hunch might be in there.” With his success, a new problem has cropped up: he also receives a huge number of unusable submissions. He’s been sent a few, he says, that are too scandalous to post. “It’s so frustrating,” he says. But “I’d get sued pretty quickly.” Far more often, he gets “very personal letters—from their grandma, or their grandpa … and it’s this very lovely letter. But I receive so many of them, and I’ve seen them so many times that they’re not ” He trails off, like he can’t quite bring himself to say that these precious family heirlooms can be boring. “I have to write some very tactful rejection letters.”

The idea behind the Letters of Note project—that correspondence holds a rare communicative and aesthetic power—also happens to be well calibrated for the Internet. It hits on a juncture of Pinterest-style object nostalgia, an appetite for emotive but bite-size reading, and a mild voyeurism. Usher points out the irony that “the very service that’s going to kill off letter writing” is responsible for bringing these missives before so many eyes.

Before starting his Web site, Usher says, he was “just terrible about keeping in touch in general.” Now he tries to communicate via letter as much as possible, and he recently bought a “decrepit” nineteen-fifties typewriter for that purpose. (He used the typewriter to write the two-page intro to his book, although getting a perfect copy took him three days and sent him “screaming through the house.”) He finds that mechanical typing changes the content of what he writes. “When I sit down to write a letter, I’m in a completely different frame of mind than when I write an e-mail…. I’m definitely more honest. I’m more keen to do something personal…. Maybe, deep down, I don’t really trust electronic communications.”

Usher seems resigned to the fact that he’s taken up the cause of a dying discipline. “I don’t know if it will every completely vanish—in fact I’m sure it won’t completely vanish. But it’s going to be such a niche kind of interest or hobby. I mean, I’m not quite as bad as the next person, but I’m quite lazy as well. I’ll often just write an e-mail just for the sake of brevity. And I kick myself every time I do it, but there’s no other option.”

Letters from Letters of Note, written by (from left to right) Annie Oakley, Elvis Presley, and Jack the Ripper. Courtesy Chronicle Books.